Tuesday, May 15, 2018

David Leonhardt

Op-Ed Columnist

Today brings primaries in four more states — Idaho, Nebraska, Oregon and Pennsylvania — and includes a few left-vs.-center battles for the Democrats.

I think the most important thing for Democrats is nominating candidates with the best chance of winning in November, given the importance of holding President Trump accountable. And often, the more electable candidate in a congressional primary is the more moderate one. But “often” isn’t the same as “always.” Sometimes, a more radical candidate can actually be more electable.

Why? Because most voters don’t make decisions by analyzing the policy positions of the candidates and deciding who’s more liberal, moderate or conservative. Many voters instead support candidates who connect with them and their values. This ability to connect isn’t necessarily more common among moderates than among strong progressives (or, on the Republican side, strong conservatives).

In today’s races, it is not entirely clear which Democrats are the most electable. But the results will clearly affect the ideological makeup of the party’s November field, given the candidates’ differences. Among the races to watch:

* Pennsylvania’s Seventh Congressional district, including Allentown, offers a classic ideological split, one that HuffPost says “embodies the fight for the future of the Democratic Party.” It has three top-tier candidates: John Morganelli, a local district attorney who has previously praised Trump; Susan Wild, a progressive former Allentown city official who’s the moderate in the field; and Greg Edwards, a pastor who campaigned with Bernie Sanders recently.

* Nebraska’s Second, including Omaha. “In a true Democratic establishment-vs.-progressive battle, former Democratic Congressman Brad Ashford has a primary race against liberal Kara Eastman,” Mark Murray and Carrie Dann of NBC write. Roseann Moring of The Omaha World-Herald walks through the candidates’ big differences, including their stances on corporate-tax rates, trade, Medicare-for-all and political style (compromise or fight).

* Pennsylvania’s First, north of Philadelphia, has a slightly less obvious ideological breakdown. The Navy veteran Rachel Reddick, 33, is backed by national veterans’ and women’s groups. She also was a registered Republican until recently, as Claudia Vargas of The Inquirer notes. The other leading candidate is Scott Wallace, a 66-year-old wealthy lawyer and the grandson of Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president from 1941 to 1945, Henry A. Wallace. Scott Wallace, who has the backing of many local party officials, has recently helped run a foundation focused on global warming and voting rights.

Whomever you’re rooting for, I’ll end with another reminder not to fall victim to the pundit fallacy — the misplaced view that one’s own ideological preferences always amount to good political strategy.

Jerusalem. Heather Hurlburt of New America and my colleague Michelle Goldberg both see the Trump administration’s Israel policy — including the opening of a new embassy in Jerusalem yesterday — as wrongheaded. “The U.S. will now have less influence over what happens on the ground,” Hurlburt writes in New York magazine, “but be seen to have greater responsibility for all the minuses of the outcome.” And Goldberg writes: “The more Trumpism and Israel are intertwined, the more left-leaning Americans will grow alienated from Zionism.”

Dan Shapiro, Barack Obama’s former ambassador to Israel, takes a more optimistic view: “A US embassy in West Jerusalem is correct and reasonable. It has always been Israel’s capital and would remain Israeli territory in any plausible 2 state map.”